Joy JuedesChapman University Assistant Professor Rakesh Tiwari has been awarded a nearly $600,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how peptides can combat drug-resistant bacteria.
Tiwari, who teaches at Chapman’s School of Pharmacy, is collaborating with Assad Kazeminy, founder of AJK Biopharmaceutical LLC in Irvine, for the project.
The grant project is titled “Development of Broad-Spectrum Cyclic Amphiphilic Peptides against Multidrug-Resistant Bacteria.”
Tiwari says it may be Chapman’s first NIH grant that teams up with a small business. Tiwari’s research focuses on using peptides – which are chains of amino acids – and small molecules to fight problems like drug-resistant bacteria and prostate cancer.
Tiwari says that the annual worldwide 700,000-plus deaths due to antimicrobial resistance could increase to 10 million by 2050 unless new antibiotics are discovered.
